I let the dog out just now. It’s 7:45pm, and the sun has just dipped below the horizon. The sky is a shade of steeled blue, gradually fading from a soft powder, zigzagged with telephone wires strung from poles, up to a nighttime brand of grayishness. There’s been weather lately — the intense, wet kind. This cool, slightly breezy dusk has me standing in the backyard looking upwards, as usual.
I’d seen them before, the bats. Every once in a while I’d see something zip across the evening sky, and I thought it to be a bat. But I haven’t lived here all that long to know whether I’m seeing things or not. In Gainesville, there was an official “Bat House” run by UF on their campus to house several trillion bats that had heretofore been living inside the cavernous vaulted ceilings of the football cathedral, terrorizing the fans. I was expecting to see bats in Gainesville. Sarasota… I didn’t know.
But tonight (tonight, whoa-whoa ~Phil Collins) they are everywhere. Zigging and swooping and divebombing and careening and chirping their little sonar blips of “where’s the bug” as they come out for breakfast. Dozens of them. These little rubber birds (much like moths are dusty butterflies) that live somewhere else, who knows where, overlap my life in the briefest of fleeting moments. It’s this little window, when the light is right, that we cross paths. And it’s nice.